Working in a VR tool!

If you check this blog once in a while, you may have noticed that I have not shared a lot of work about being progressing in my games, so yeah, I have a good reason ;). Besides my full time job I'm studying a Master in Computer Science, and as part of it I have been working in a tool for VR for my thesis.

The tool was conceived about one year ago, I did investigation and improved the prototype for a while. I must admit that the bureaucracy behind writing a thesis have delayed the process, but anyway it also helped to define some limits and dates, which is sometimes the hardest part when creating things on your own.

What I'm working on is an input method for VR, it is ready as a prototype but still not for the market, specially I need to write a nice API documentation so people can use it easily. I don't want to explain it in detail, there is a lot to say and probably it would better to do it with a video, so let's do that later, for now I will talk about the motivation behind it.

As you can read in my previous post, after analyzing the VR market I see that basically we are in the middle of a war, everybody wants to be the one that made the VR history, and that means that the big companies are really pushing to lead the VR scenario. However from my point of view, the market is still not that big to start focusing on particular visors as it is in the consoles market for example. So what I'm trying to do here is to push in a direction that could make more people to know and get interest in VR content, and I'm trying to do it with this input method focused on accessibility.

I still have a lot of work to do in my thesis, but hopefully I will complete it soon and will be able to concentrate in creating a good API documentation and sharing the tool with some developers. Stay tuned!

Random Maze Generation Methodology

Some weeks with no chance to post anything around here, however they were really productive weeks for me in game development. I have been working in a couple projects that are not games, but are tools for game creation.

Inspired from BARKH, Lal0l and I worked in this "methodology" for maze generation that is supposed to work for a very specific kind of games. The idea is not just to create random mazes, but to create playable mazes with different difficulty levels.

How to make sure a maze is playable? Well, we need to define some basic game rules. The kind of games this methodology is intended for, have the following characteristics:

1. The objective for each level is to move your avatar from point A to point B in the maze. This implies that the maze’s entrance and exit are not necessarily at the border of the maze but rather at any point inside of it.
2. The player has a limited set of resources that are consumed as the maze gets discovered. Examples of resources can be: fuel, time, characters, health points.
3. Along the maze the player can find beneficial zones or items and use them to recover or save resources. We called these 1ups.
4. We called 1downs harmful areas or enemies which can reduce the player’s resources.
5. The maze is generated automatically each time the game is played. Optionally, the player can have a limited number of chances to complete a given maze, this depends on game design decisions.

We called this kind of games Cost Based Maze games (CBM games).

Our methodology has 2 main parts, the first part generates the maze's topology, i.e. the corridors and walls. The second part, spreads 1ups and 1downs randomly over the maze, then it uses the difficulty level to find the correct positions for them. The amount of 1ups and 1downs depends on the difficulty level as well.

After implement this in Unity I realized it has good potential. I'm thinking some game ideas to use this, however I haven't decided yet, maybe I will post later about that.

For now here is a detailed (formal) document about this methodology. It is focused on the algorithms, not in Unity. I hope you find it interesting!